When I finally find Garen in the lunch room the next day, he’s surrounded by at least half a dozen people from his Musical Theory class. A small guy with thick black eyeliner applied raccoon-style is leaning his head against Garen’s shoulder, and somehow my brain decides I’m interrupting something. I stand there completely still, my face getting hotter by the second, until I finally decide it’s time to turn around and walk away. It’s at that second that Garen looks up.

“Travis. Hey,” he says. I shove my hands in my sweatshirt pocket and twist the ring around and around my finger out of sight. “Uh, guys, this is my… friend. Travis,” he says slowly. The guy in eyeliner sits up a little straighter.

“Hey. I’m Ben. I think I’ve seen you around. You’re a sophomore, right?” he asks.

“Junior,” I say. “Garen, can I--”

“Why don’t you join us?” Ben interrupts. I don’t want to. It’s pretty obvious from the look I give him, but then Garen shifts down the bench a little and I take the space next to him.

“Any interest in helping me study for Chemistry?” he asks. I extract my hand from my pocket and bite down on my thumbnail.

“Didn’t you just have a test like, a week ago?” I ask. He shakes his head.

“No, that one was my French test,” he says. I remember now. He wrote French phrases on my bare chest in felt-tipped marker. I asked him to translate for me since I take Spanish instead, but he refused, so later I copied down all of the phrases onto a piece of paper that’s now folded up in the back of my Pre-Calculus notebook.

“Oh,” I reply. I take his notebook and flip through his notes. “Do you have a pen?” I add. He holds one out, and I take it, underlining all of the main topics in the section.

“Have you eaten yet?” he asks. I glance up from the notes, and he’s staring at me, almost accusingly.

“Since when are you my dad?” I ask.

“Since you now seem to like me about as much as you like him. And that’s a ‘no,’ I take it,” he replies.

“Very nice. Are you going to ask me about my pills too?” I demand. On his other side, Ben suddenly snaps his fingers.

“That’s where I know you from! You’re the guy who tried to kill himself that one time, and then they had all those assemblies about dealing with depression because of it!” he says. I snap my eyes back to the notebook, and the guy across from Ben shoves at him with one hand.

“God, get some fucking tact, dude,” he hisses. They start bickering back and forth, and I flip to a new page in the notebook and scrawl Can we talk alone?

Garen stares at it, then takes the pen from me. It’ll be obvious if we leave together now. Just tell me what you have to say.

Fuck. This isn’t part of the plan. This isn’t even Plan B, because that plan was only created after I fucked up Plan A, which was basically centered around being straight. This is Plan C, in which the entire world is against me, Garen thinks I hate him, and some guy in eyeliner can barely keep his hands off him. In Plan C, I am pretty much going to be screwed by anything I say or do, so I might as well stop pretending that I can make things normal again.

I grab the notebook, uncap the pen, and carefully print I love you too in small letters underneath the previous two lines. Garen stares at it, then at me, then at the words again. Finally, he shoves the notebook into the bag under the table and grabs my hand, yanking me to my feet and dragging me out of the cafeteria into the hall. As soon as the door shuts behind me, he spins around and opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally, if only to fill the silence. He almost-laughs and shakes his head.

“Please say anything except that,” he says. I reach out and wrap one arm around his waist and press my face against his neck. I pray to God the hall is empty.

“I love you. I fucking wish I didn’t, because suddenly being gay and in love with you is the last thing I need in my life right now, but I can’t help it. I just can’t. I try to be around you all the time, and then when I can’t be, I’m thinking about it, and I’m thinking about you, or us, or what the fuck this means about who I thought I was. This isn’t what my life is supposed to be like, but I don’t want it to stop.”

“It doesn’t have to stop,” he says, almost on reflex, and then I swear I feel him flinch. I laugh slightly.

“Yeah, it fucking does. Do you forget the part of last night where our parents got engaged?” I point out. He shakes his head.

“And do you forget what you told me the first time we talked? You told me it wasn’t going to last. You told me it would be fine. And I’m holding you to that, whether you like it or not,” he says. I readjust to I can stare over his shoulder at my hand and the tiny silver band circling my finger. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.